Google+ is now ready for the masses. As confirmed on Google's blog site, the social networking service is finally open to anyone who wants to use it. Since Google launched Google+ back in late June, the service has been accessible only via an invite from another Google+ user. Even with that limitation, Google+ had an initial explosion in terms of user numbers, making some people believe that Facebook finally has some true competition. This new move will likely mean yet another boost in user sign ups for Google+.

In his blog post today, Google's Vic Gundotra said, "The Google+ project has been in field trial for just under 90 days, and in that time we’ve made 91 different improvements (many of which are posted here). Google+ is still in its infancy, of course, but we’re more excited than ever to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software." Besides opening up Google+ to everyone, Gundotra went over some of the other improvements made to the service. Several of them center on Hangouts, which gives users live video features; hangouts is now available via Android 2.3 based mobile phones.

The biggest new feature is that search is now live for Google+ with Gundotra saying, "Just type what you’re looking for into the Google+ search box, and we’ll return relevant people and posts, as well as popular content from around the web."